


Blood In The Water

by Missy



Category: Burn Notice
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Angst, Apocalypse, F/M, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-29
Updated: 2011-05-29
Packaged: 2017-10-19 21:38:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/205478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Missy/pseuds/Missy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Don't Drink the water - that's how it spreads...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blood In The Water

**Author's Note:**

  * For [voodoochild](https://archiveofourown.org/users/voodoochild/gifts).



> Written for voodoochild the [End of the World Comment Ficathon](http://rise-your-dead.livejournal.com/friends/). Thanks to afullmargin for beta!

It started with a little spill up river. Twelve fluid ounces of hospital waste poured into a stream that cut through the Biscayne Aquifer, cycled through two treatment plants and poured directly into the water supply .

Four people had died painful deaths at Miami General before Sam got the first word. His conversation, held loudly and quite publically at Carlitos, swung from casual to panicked in a series of exclaimed vowels shouted into the receiver. Fiona threw Michael a concerned look as their waitress arrived with their drink order. Before Fiona could take her first sip, Sam’s hand lashed out, knocking the bloody mary from her hands.

“You drunken sod!” she protested, trying to blot the tomato juice out of her bodice.

“Don’t order anything with water in it,” Sam said, his urgency immediate and impassioned.

“What’s wrong?” Michael asked, immediately changing attitudes; he saw the confusion in Fiona’s expression change to dawning horror and then reflexively checked to make sure his gun was locked and loaded where he’d left it.

“Four people at Miami general died after they drank the water. The whole hospital’s in quarantine – word’s gonna come down soon. First it’s a boil order but they don’t think that’ll do it…”

Fiona stared at the celery that had rolled into her lap. “I was going to wash my hair,” she complained.

“One of us needs to get mom,” Michael observed, getting up, tossing what they owed on the table.

“I’m gonna clear out the market before word spread.” He gave a gruff chuckle. “I don’t want anybody sniping my brand.” He stuffed his cell back into his pocket. “Where are we going to meet up?” Sam asked.

“The loft,” Michael said; all compasses still pointed north for him.

“I need my C4,” Fiona said, her voice numb; Michael knew she sought her metaphorical security blanket and tried to squeeze her hand.

“Come as soon as you can,” Michael demanded. The loft was fortified; they could live there for a while if they needed to.

“I’ll take you,” Sam offered suddenly, and Fiona gave him an appraising look of bemusement.

“Listen to Sam,” Michael told Fiona, which earned him a dangerous glare. “Please.”

Fiona agreed.

They both knew that Sam had saved their lives.

Michael only hoped it wouldn’t be for the last time.

***

Madeline had been resentful when Sam arrived with a sportscar filled with beer, weapons-grade explosives and bottled water; halfway home the radio was already awash with ‘concerns’ and ‘crisis’s’.

“This is how they do it,” Fiona complained, pulling into her place in Michael’s lot, pulling her well-waxed leg higher against her chest. “They fill the news with false reports and stir everyone up. It’s such a waste of perfectly good adrenalin.”

“I should have checked the stove,” Madeline worried; she was chainsmoking too close to the explosives for Sam’s taste.

“The house will still be here when this is old news,” Sam declared. “Can you help me with this stuff?”

Both women immediately carried what they could up the rickety staircase to the door of Michael’s loft.

And were greeted by the business end of a forty-five.

***

“I still can’t believe you tried to shoot us,” Sam complained, as they passed around another set of MREs. It had been four days; the local media had urged everyone to drink bottled water and avoid showering and, as Sam predicted, the boil order had become manadory if useless. Eventually the entirety of Dade County was encouraged to drink soley bottled water. The beaches had been closed, as there was fear that the infection had somehow leaked into the ocean through a leaking sewer pipe, and there were fliers plastered everywhere of the severe, viral symptoms that signaled the onset of what the media called the Panhandle Flu. Overall, there reigned a sense of barely-organized chaos, just enough that the media had made notice of it and were mocking the overreaction of the people. Fatalities were near ninety percent – only the rare, inexplicably lucky ones lived on to be studied and experimented on. Most died with their eyes bleeding, screaming from the terrible pain, their capillaries bursting from the force of endless vomiting. It was an illness that had no preference for class or gender and indiscriminately took the old and young, the rich and poor. There was no vaccine, nor any cure.  
The crisis was going to get worse before it got better. They knew that, and were braced for it.

“Standard procedure, Sam,” Michael remarked. The local ban on Florida-native foods had left him eating Swedish yogurt from a gourmet market; pricy but not as bad as he’d presumed. He also tried to adjust to the lack of work and pounding of terrible disco rock coming from underneath his feet. Otherwise, it was a normal world. If he didn’t look outside.

Fiona sat at his side with a half-eaten dinner, limply resting against him. He poked her shoulder. “Are you okay?”

“Mmm? It’s the heat,” she replied, wiping the sweat from her brow.

“You should have sprung for air conditioning, Mikey,” Sam complained.

“You can pick the curtains for our next safehouse,” Michael said dryly.

***

They should have known. Predicted it in the heat of Fiona’s eyes. Whenever you think you’re at your safest, that’s when the world gets you – with a little cough and a twist of the ankle, it sucks you down into the pool of misery.

Fiona had been vomiting for three days straight; her fever burned on. Sometimes she shouted in Gaelic for her mother as Michael replaced the dressing on her forehead, and he could do nothing but hold her hand and wish she’d kick him in the ribs. The CDC told them that this day, the fourth of her illness, would be the deciding factor; would she join the others, or the five percent of people who inexplicably lived? He paced with his gun at his side, listening to his mother shuffle from the bed to the kitchen with bowls of canned chicken broth no one wanted to eat.

Damn it, where was Sam?

The door rolled open, and his best friend entered, carrying a paper bag filled with bottles of rubbing alcohol. “It’s all I could get,” he said. “There’s a wasteland out there, Mike.”

“You’re ten minutes late,” Michael said, bending down to comfort his moaning girlfriend. Setting aside the gun, he started applying the alchol to a rag and pressing it to her blazing-hot skin.

“Yeah, well,” Sam laughed nervously. “I found a couple of kids wandering around. They couldn’t find their mom, so…”

The situation finally made Michael explode. “God damn it, Sam!” he shouted, pounding the wall beside his head with his fist. “I need you well!”

Sam glared back at Michael. “These people need us,” he reminded Michael.

“We need each other more. We’re the only ones we can trust…”

Sam jabbed Michael in the chest with his thumb. “There are little kids dying out there just because they were unlucky enough to sip a glass of water at the wrong time. Why not me? I’m an old man – they should have a whole life ahead of them, but they’re dying and I could skip to Toronto!”

Fiona let out a guttural moan, and Madeline rushed to stroke her brow. “If you boys have to argue, could you please do it outside?” Her voice held a note of silent menace that Michael understood instinctively.

He glanced back over his shoulder at the bed, where Fi tossed in her sleep. Sam rested a hand on Michael’s shoulder.

“She’s gonna beat this.”

***

On the tenth day, Florida was cut off from the outside world by order of the government. The sound of choppers circling overhead and boats motoring through the water played on a nonstop loop, but Michael, Sam and Fiona, with their warzone experience, slumbered like children.

Maddie, naturally, complained. “It’s bad enough we have to wash our hands with soda! Are they trying to drive us crazy? I can’t hear myself think!”

Michael and Sam had tried to fix that last matter by making a filtration system for the far-off day when the taps began running again, but didn’t dare risk their health to test it.

Days melted into each other like marshmallows in a mug of cocoa. John Stewart stopped making jokes about Florida being ‘the unhappiest place in the world’ and started earnestly pleading for more Red Cross aid. A woman in a slicker and an upswept hairdo came by with a care package and Michael, zombie-like from exhaustion, took it without complaining.

Fiona stopped throwing up, but her fever rose. And so Michael spent an endless week watching the eyes he loved most in the world for signs of death.

***

Sam glanced into the chamber of his Walther and plugged a bullet inside. Michael watched him, slugging down his beer.

“If it comes to it,” he said, “there’s one for each of us.” He glanced back at the bed. “They’re cop killers. Armor-piercing.”

He held out the gun, and Michael didn’t think twice before he took it. Holding the cool steel in his hand for ten minutes, he forced himself to take that nightmare mental journey; imagined blowing out the brains of his best friend, the woman he loved, his own mother. Michael was a soldier, and could kill if the situation called for it, but...the people he loved most? He didn’t know if his mettle would be up to the task.

Sam cut off his morose thoughts. “It sucks being the last one out.”

***

He closed his eyes and dreamed that night – of a warm-blooded world filled with people. Of running down a crowded, sun-bleached street to meet Fiona, who waited, alive and laughing, for him. The ocean was blue and the water good and sweet again, washing around their knees as he held her close.

When he woke up, Sam was kneeling by the bed. Madeline stood turned away from them both, giving them a world of space, and his heart leapt into his throat. He looked up and saw Sam’s face. “Mike,” Sam whispered, his eyes glowing with amazement. “Her fever broke!”

***

Michael and Sam sat on the roof of Carlitos, watching the last National Guard tank clatter out of the state. Over thirty thousand people had died in the disaster, and the water system had only just recently been successfully flushed. The ocean was declared clean once again for seagoers everywhere. Florida began the business of silently climbing out of the hole it had fallen into.

It was otherwise business as normal.

He and Sam And Fi and Maddie went to the beach. Sam fished in his ugly Panama hat, Maddie combed the beach for shells, and Michael and Fiona walked out into the ocean. And when it washed over his head, warm and sweet, Michael held out his arms and embraced the possibility of the future.

THE END


End file.
